RE: why linux?

> Every time I read one of these "religious wars" where people adamantly
> defend Windows, I always find myself thinking "What would Microsoft have
> to do in order for these people to lose faith in them?"   And, I can't
> imagine anything!
>
> I mean, if the OS being unstable doesn't do it -- and the security being
> an afterthought doesn't do it -- and the almost continual compatibility
> problems don't do it -- and the fact that they make up new standards
> instead of following existing ones doesn't do it.... what will?
>
> And then I wonder why I enter these discussions.  Since if Windows being
> a piece of junk doesn't convince you to try something else, certainly
> nothing that I say will.

AMEN to that. I mean, speaking as one who still uses Xerox Ventura
Publisher regularly (i.e., the REAL Xerox Ventura Publisher, the DOS/GEM
edition from before Corel got their grimy meat-hooks into it and turned it
into a bad imitation of PageFaker), I can say that as a GUI for
non-Macintosh, non-Amiga systems, good old Digital Research GEM is far
superior to ANY version of Windoze. It runs on as little as an 8088, and
while the application might have response time problems on such a small,
slow machine, the GUI certainly doesn't. True, it didn't have
multitasking, or any of the other slick features that went into Windoze,
UNIX or MacOS, but it did the job of presenting a user interface very
well. Ditto for GEOS. Ditto for Tandy DeskMate. And of course, the
Macintosh (and before it, the Lisa) were doing it on good old fashioned
68000s. And the Amiga managed to do BOTH a GUI AND multitasking with just
a 68000 (and some then-new ideas, like a hardware blitter), and it wasn't
REALLY that much more unstable than Windoze is.

--
JHHL